Catalogue of Publications
(Click on title of book to view)
CROWN JEWELS: FIVE GREAT NATIONAL PARKS AROUND THE WORLD AND THE CHALLENEGES THEY FACE
Conceptualization, editing of international contributors,
author of chapter 1 Introduction to Protected Areas in the U.S. and
chapter 7 Changes in the Scientific Understanding of Nature.
157 pages with 82 color plates, 17 black & white photographs and 8 maps
Washington: American Alliance of Museums Press, May 2013
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This lavishly illustrated book accompanied an exhibition at the Presidio Trust at the
Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 2014. It features various photographers and expert contributors from five continents. Unlike almost every other book on national parks, this is not just a celebration of their natural beauties and wildlife but a deep view of the politics behind their creation and the many threats to their future in the age of climate change. The Introduction charts the global distribution of national parks and how much territory is protected on each continent. Chapter One is a history of national parks and other protected areas in the US from the federal Bureau of Land Management to the new private land trusts. The history of the US Park Service is not an even, upward ascent. This book recounts the setbacks the parks have experienced as political winds blew hot and cold. No other book tells this story candidly. The Last chapter—Changes in the Scientific Understanding of Nature— considers whether national parks can be kept “unimpaired” since the current ecological paradigm does not assume the nature is stable or that it automatically produces equilibrium. "National parks are the canaries in the coal mine of the contemporary world. Crown Jewels remind us that our world's stunningly beautiful national parks are an irreplaceable resource with an uncertain future - and that all of us are key to securing that future." -Randolph Delehanty, historian, Presidio Trust "For all of us concerned about global efforts to preserve and sustain these priceless reserves of land and wildlife known as the world's national parks, Crown Jewels - beautifully illustrated, authoritatively written - offers us history, hope, and an honest appraisal of the tasks ahead." -Ford W. Bell, president, the American Alliance of Museums BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
NEW GUARDIANS FOR THE GOLDEN GATE:
HOW AMERICA GOT A GREAT NATIONAL PARK
338 pages with 5 maps, 42 color plates and 44 b/w photographs.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.
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This book was written by Amy Meyer, one of the co-founders of the
Golden Gate National Recreation Area. My role was photo research and caption writing. Black and white photos distributed throughout the text record the people and events behind the creation of the park. Two signatures of superb color photographs by noted Bay Area photographers capture The Lands and Waters of the Golden Gate and a photo essay on Enjoying the Parks. No other national park has had its political history recounted by one of its founders. This is a unique story about a unique place and one of the signal victories of the environmentalist 1970s. “One of the almost forgotten ingredients in the modern environmental renaissance that exploded in the 1960s and 1970s is the role played by neighbors turned activists turned world savers. [This book] takes us back to the time before professional environmentalism, when an entire movement was created from the backyard out, powered by the simple belief that no one knew better what should happen to a place than the people who loved it.” -Carl Pope, Executive Director, Sierra Club “The most comprehensive story in print of the grassroots coalition and political struggles of park creation.” -U.S. Rep. Mark E. Souder (R-IN) Congressional National Park Caucus “Neighbors, environmentalists, ranchers, politicians, generals, and scoundrels interact in this great social history.” -Jim Chappell, San Francisco Planning and Research Associate BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
THE COMPANION TO SOUTHERN LITERATURE:
THEMES, GENRES, PLACES, PEOPLE, MOVEMENTS, AND MOTIFS
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, Spring 2002.
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This ten-page essay on art and artists in the South was commissioned by the Louisiana State University Press. It is a succinct account of the visual arts in the region from its early colonial ports and remote plantations to the booming, modern, urbanized South. The inhibiting influences of aniconic Baptist culture and the lack of major cities and their patrons meant that visual art was slow to develop in the Old South. As the South industrialized after World War II, and as each state developed state universities with art departments, Southerners who wished to study art no longer had to travel North or to Europe. The cultural self-confidence of today’s South has encouraged the region’s artists to develop highly individual and disparate styles. Contemporary curators have also promoted “outsider art” which is often visionary, spiritual and self-taught. Recently, attention has focussed on African American artists in the region. BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
SAN FRANSISCO VICTORIANS
Photographs by Mike Blumensaadt / Essay by Randolph Delehanty
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, Spring 2000.
143 pages with 110 color plates and 1 map.
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This pocket-sized book features more than 100 photographs of the
most distinctive facades in the city including the colorful paint schemes of the present. The introductory essay explains how the wooden row house evolved to fit the city’s long lots. The photos are organized by the succession of styles that swept California: Early Styles, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Eastlake (or Stick), Queen Anne, Shingle Style, and the Colonial and Classical Revival styles. The back of the book cites the best sources to learn more and also lists the Victorians open to the public in Northern California where you can experience the various styles. BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
RANDOLPH DELEHANTY'S ULTIMATE GUIDE TO NEW ORLEANS
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, Spring 1998.
383 pages with 14 maps and 12 drawings
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Witty and deliciously detailed, this book takes you on revealing
walking tours through every layer of this unique city, whether French, African, Spanish, Creole, or American. The book explains New Orleans’s complex racial history of free whites, free people of color, and enslaved Africans. Both the high points and low points of the city’ checkered history are touched upon. Special interest covered include African American sites, Jewish New Orleans, Gay New Orleans and Voodoo. Special attention is given to the evolution of jazz and where to hear great music. A section on New Orleans house design and sociability explains the evolution of stoops, balconies, galleries and porches. A section in the back of the book summarizes the key periods and landmarks in New Orleans from French settlement to the Civil Right era. Each chapter opens with a drawing by noted New Orleans artist Simon Gunning, who also did the cover. It includes:
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ART IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH:
WORKS FROM THE OGDEN COLLECTION
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, Fall 1996.
240 color plates with commentaries and 3 maps
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This large format, profusely illustrated book looks at art in
the South and also looks at the South through its art. Roger Houston Ogden, an attorney and developer in New Orleans, has assembled one of the finest collections of southern American art in all media. The book opens with an essay on southern art and culture which traces the artistic trends and movements in the region, including genre painting, impressionism, tonalism, and the emergence of women, African American, and folk artists. This succinct history explains the inhibiting effect of anionic Baptist culture in the South and conversely the deep strain of spirituality in the region’s visual culture. The heart of the book is divided into thematic sections — landscape and light; rivers and seaboards; flora, fauna and clay; still lives; rural and urban scenes; Southerners; and spirit, soul, and signs in the South. Each double page spread presents artworks in conversing pairs, enabling the viewer to follow the progress of artistic movements and styles as they unfolded over time. The book presents the persistent and striking counterpoint of academic art and folk, or outsider, art among both Black and white self-taught artists that is so distinctive of the visual arts in the South today. A selected bibliography, index of artists, and general index concludes the volume. The Ogden Collection became the seed of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans: www.ogdenmuseum.org. BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
CLASSIC NATCHEZ:
AN ILLUSTRATED TOUR THROUGH A REMARKABLE ANTEBELLUM TOWN
Text by Randolph Delehanty / Photographs by Van Jones Martin.
Savannah: Golden Coast Publishing, 1996.
164 pages with 120 color photographs and 3 maps.
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Natchez is unique. The first important port on the Mississippi River
upriver from New Orleans, she sits on a commanding bluff with an oceanic view of lowland Louisiana across the water to the west. Natchez took its name from the mound-building Indigenous people whom the French dispossessed. Later the British and then the Spanish empires held this strategic fort on the great river. It became US territory in 1795 and the first capital of the new Mississippi Territory. In the nineteenth century, enormous wealth was accumulated by cotton planters using enslaved African labor. Many of those planters from the region chose not to live on their remote properties but to cluster in the City of Natchez for a richer social life and to educate their children. They ringed the town with a crescent of extraordinarily opulent suburban villas in all the latest architectural fashions set in spacious “parks”. All survived the Civil War. This book features 43 landmark houses and their intact, or restored, interiors. This is the most comprehensive and informative book about this genuinely unique Southern city. An illustrated timeline with maps, archival photographs, architectural renderings, and floor plans prefaces the portfolio of beautiful contemporary color photographs by Van Jones Martin. BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
NEW ORLEANS:
ELEGANCE AND DECADENCE
Photographs by Richard Sexton
224 pages with 230 color photographs and 2 maps
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, Fall 1993, revised 2005.
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New Orleans - a city where seductive, Old World elegance combines with a kaleidoscope of African influences and the revelry of Mardi Gras to create a contemporary ambience, unique among cities. An impressionistic tour-de-force, New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence reveals
a city at once enigmatic and complex. Richard Sexton's lush photographs capture the interiors, furnishings, art collections, and gardens of New Orleans residences where classic refinement and cultivated decadence are gracefully juxtaposed. Randolph Delehanty's insightful observations about the city's history reveal its many different faces. New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence celebrates the joyous spirit of this distinctive culture and is an inspiration to those of us everywhere who pursue the art of living. "A dreamy poem of a book... A tribute to a lifestyle of insouciance and exuberance, touched by both spirituality and worldliness... Rarely has the city been loved so wisely and so well." -New Orleans Times - Picayune "Signs of age and the patina of centuries are celebrated at every turn... This is the definitive volume for those who've wanted to visit sunny verandas and shotgun cottages in New Orleans." -San Francisco Chronicle BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
IN THE VICTORIAN STYLE
Text by Randolph Delehanty / Photographs by Richard Sexton.
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, October 1991, revised 2006.
192 pages with 170 color photographs and 2 maps.
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San Francisco’s Victorian houses, collectively among the finest in
North America, are masterfully captured in this authoritative work. This is the definitive sourcebook for architects, designers, decorators, and lovers of Victorian homes everywhere. As much a social and cultural history as an architectural one, this book traces the development of Victorian domestic architecture explaining how new methods of financing, marketing, construction, utilities, and furnishing made it possible to build whole neighborhoods of these expressive houses. As the topic sentence of the Introduction says: “The San Francisco Victorian house was essentially modern.” The text incorporates the voices of the Victorians themselves and relates how cultural values and changes in family life shaped these buildings from within. It goes beyond facades and parlors and explores the rarely seen details of private living spaces including kitchens and pantries, bedrooms, bathrooms, and back porches. Detailed floor plans, color coded according to public, private, or servant spaces, “read” Victorian family life and social structure in architectural plans. Richard Sexton’s more than 150 color photographs record individual houses, period rooms, architectural details, rows of Victorians and sweeping cityscapes showing how these now- treasured buildings fit into one of the most beautiful cities in the world. This book was the result of my years as the first historian for The Foundation for San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage in the 1970s at the dawn of the preservation movement and my work as the first curator of the Haas-Lilienthal House built in 1886. www.haas-lilienthalhouse.org. “Far and away the finest book ever published on Victorian architecture in San Francisco.” -Allan Temko, Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic, San Francisco Chronicle “One of the best books ever done on American domestic architecture. -Marcus Binney, architectural writer for The Times (London). BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
SAN FRANCISCO:
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE (REVISED)
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, July 1989, revised edition June 1995.
496 pages with maps and drawings.
(1995)
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“The definitive reference for both tourist and native.”
Chronicle Books titled this book the “ultimate” guide because of its historical depth and expansive coverage. It is the result of about 25 years living in, reading about, walking through, lecturing on and pondering the special character of the City of San Francisco and the incomparable Bay Area. The heart of the book is a series of 16 self-guided walks organized around key historic sites, beautiful interiors open to the public, museums, parks and gardens, commercial strips and scenic viewpoints in one of the world’s most beloved cities. It explores and explains 14 of the city’s most diverse and colorful neighborhoods as well as the economic engine of the vibrant, walkable, architectural distinguished Financial District. Union Square, Pacific Heights, Nob Hill, Chinatown, North Beach and Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Mission District, Japantown, the Castro, the Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Park, and the Presidio on the spectacular Golden Gate are all included. Each tour travels through particular architectural zones and relates the deep social histories of who lived there, how they have changed over time, and what role they played, and still play, in the collective cultural life of this dynamic city. It includes all the usual information in a good guide but goes much deeper than most. It seeks to answer the question of how and why this distinctive urban culture developed and transformed a sandy, scrubby, hilly site into a splendid, creative and beautiful cityscape universally considered one of the greatest in the world. BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
PRESERVING THE WEST:
CALIFORNIA, ARIZONA, NEVADA, UTAH, IDAHO, OREGON AND WASHINGTON
Photographs by E. Andrew McKinney.
New York: Pantheon Books and The National Trust, October 1985.
181 pages with 250 black and white photographs
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This book was commissioned by The National Trust for Historic
Preservation. Its aim was to look not only at individual landmarks but at entire historic landscapes important in western history that were threatened by oblivion or over-development. I first made a list key themes in western history — Indigenous peoples, the Spanish Missions, the blending of Mexican and Anglo peoples, ranches, regional barns, Army posts and military heritage, boom and bust mining towns, the irrigated Mormon landscapes, earthquakes and preservation, early design control in 1920s Santa Barbara, the vanishing modern architecture of Los Angeles, the Columbia River Scenic Highway and early automotive landscapes, reinvestment in old industrial cities, and citywide preservation successes. I then consulted with the State Historic Preservation Officer or staff historian in each of the seven states to refine my list and locate the best examples and make contact with local preservation organizations and experts. Then photographer E. Andrew McKinney and I planned a series of loops through the region and set out by auto to photograph the places in this book. As we traveled, I refined my list and added places that were not being preserved but deserved to be. I then sent each chapter to a local expert for corrections and suggestions. Many westerners were generous with their knowledge and time. Andrew’s good humor, expert driving, strong coffee brewed in motels and out on the open range, and quick and professional work were key to this project. It is an important visual record of preservation in the American West in 1985. BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
CALIFORNIA:
A GUIDE BOOK
San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
364 pages with various maps and a California Chronology.
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A wit once divided all the earth into two parts, California and
Elsewhere. For California is more than just a place; it is a state of mind. Many who come here to visit come back to stay. It happened to me. This guide was the result of a dozen happy years spent exploring the Golden State. Written in 1983-84, (in snowy Cambridge, Massachusetts, of all places), it sought to capture the essence of California’s natural and man-made wonders. Selectivity was its guiding principle. Thus of the 21 Franciscan missions, only five are included. Among the cities, San Francisco’s compact downtown is covered in detail while Los Angeles’s more diffuse, less attractive, though economically stronger downtown is only given brief notice. Westside L.A., on the other hand, from Hollywood through Beverly Hills to Malibu, offers more than enough world-class sights. The guide emphasizes modern design in Southern California, especially early twentieth masterpieces in Los Angeles and Pasadena. Disneyland is interpreted as an American creation myth. Victorian neighborhoods are the focus in San Francisco, Ferndale and Eureka. Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz are covered. Of the multitudinous national, state, and county parks and reserves, only the most spectacular are included. Anza-Borrego Desert and Death Valley, the Big Sur Coast, the choicest redwood groves, and iconic Yosemite Valley in the high Sierra. The book concludes with a seven-page California Chronology. While much has changed since 1984, especially in southern and central California, the historical and cultural themes woven through the guide are still relevant. It is my own California dream to travel the whole state again and update this classic guide. Perhaps the Fates (and an adventurous publisher!) will allow it. BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |
SAN FRANSISCO:
WALKS AND TOURS IN THE GOLDEN GATE CITY
New York: The Dial Press, Fall 1980.
340 pages with 29 maps and drawings.
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“My goal was to read San Francisco’s architecture and people
the way a detective would read the scene of a crime, that is, to look not only at a place, but through it to visualize the people whose lives it was and is.” This was my first book and took me 9 years to complete. I began in 1970 reading at the incomparable Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. From 1973 to 1978 I was the first historian at The Foundation for San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage at the dawn of the preservation movement. See sfheritage.org/news/heritage-50-educational-affairs/ Many years teaching San Francisco, California, and American history ensued at San Francisco State University. One ofmy courses was “San Francisco: Biography of a City.” Nancy Van Itallie at The Dial Press acquired this ambitious historical architectural guide and was my first editor. The superb ink drawings were created by gifted architect William Walters. The guide covers North Beach and Telegraph Hill, the Financial District and Jackson Square, Eastern Pacific Heights, Mission Dolores and the Mission District, Nob Hill, Chinatown, Russian Hill, the Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Park, the Castro and Noe Valley, Eight Great Interiors, and Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghirardelli Square. This book captures the Golden Gate city at the turning-point late 1970s after the hippie flowering but before the tech boom. Now it, too, is history. Reviews of San Francisco: Walks and Tours in the Golden Gate City: “Delehanty is a literary essayist in this own right, seeking to fix in sight the visual symbols of a city’s heritage and inner life.” --Kevin Starr, San Francisco Examiner “Definitive and authoritative” --Don James, Los Angeles Times "Mash Note: It's muck without meaning, but the last two sentences on page --- rise to splendid prose I wish I'd written. Them Jebbie's obviously taught you rhetoric" --Briefly Penitent Self-Appointed Editor [David R. Simmons, San Francisco] “Guidebook? No. Natives and buffs alike will say this is one of the most accessible histories of San Francisco.” —Patricia Holt, San Francisco Chronicle BUY NOW ON AMAZON BOOKS |